Assassin’s Creed has always frustrated me as a fan. I was hooked on the franchise after the first release. The concurrent plots of modern mystery and historical conflict were both extremely compelling, the gameplay itself was revolutionary, and the double cliffhanger ending laiden with puzzles and hints that fans would speculate about for months were all genius. Each subsequent title, however, suffered from a qualitative drop. The modern story grew increasingly more odious and irrelevant to the Animus gameplay, the conflict between Assassins and Templars began to blur as both organizations' ultimate goals were lost as they compromised their beliefs and credos in their shadow war, and the story was drawn to breaking as the trilogy was extended by two unnecessary sequels to Assassin's Creed II. I actually would have approved of subsequent releases like Black Flag and Unity since the global scale of the conflict lent itself to being applied to interesting points in history, but Black Flag was unable to escape from the numerous tropes which damaged the previous releases. The controversy regarding review embargos and female models surrounding Unity’s release were worrying, but I always hold the hope that the next title will be able to finally cut the fat off the franchise and really emphasize its many strong points.
There is a whole lot to like
The issue I expected to harp on the most in this review was glitches, given the rush of Unity’s release and the embarrassing number of glitches in AC3 and Black Flag. Make no mistake, they are definitely there, but it does seem like Ubisoft has been able to clean things up since launch. Most of the glitches seem to revolve around the newest content like being able to jump inside and navigate through buildings. Arno seems to lose all his spatial awareness around windows and will jump on just about anything around the window before going inside. In fact, there just seems to be a lot of weird interactions around windows in particular--sills and balconies are both dangerous territory as I hit clipping issues quite often, especially when trying to take out guards posted on them. But hey, I have yet to hit a single game-breaking glitch or was never actually forced to restart the game, so that already beats my experience of just the first few hours of AC3 by magnitudes. Ultimately I only bluescreened once over the course of the entire game, so Unity is a net improvement.
So many things can go wrong, like clipping
Combat has been slowed down in what I guess is an attempt to make it seem more like measured swordfighting. It actually takes the game back to basics like the original Assassin’s Creed, where fighting was tremendously dangerous, far before the acrobatic melee kills that that could be performed in the middle of large groups in the last few releases. There are some unfortunate elements in all this, though. First and most, tragically, is that there are a very limited number of attack and execute combinations. Fighting begins to feel stale before you are even halfway through the game, as all attacks begin to look very similar. They begin to blend together after a while and become a chore. This is especially true since since dodging is extremely awkward and difficult to time and a great deal of the games glitches tend to show up during fights. Nothing is quite as frustrating as Arno stopping an attack mid-swing to randomly begin reloading his wrist crossbow. Well, except maybe fighting inside--if you are standing in a house, then the camera always seems to find the angle which makes the smallest number of enemies visible at a time, which makes fighting even more dangerous since spotting changes to the color of the enemies' lifebars is necessary to knowing how to defend. More than once I was impaled mid-parry by the bayonet of an off-screen enemy.
"Hold on, guys. These cap and ball guns take forever to reload"
I would liken the changes to the bells and whistles of the release to the differences between the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig 007 films. A lot of fancy gadgets have been removed for some back to basics sneaking and stabbing. Much of your accessories have been reduced to a small upgrade system which is functionally simple and includes some neat co-op abilities that you will likely never effectively use. Everything felt more streamlined and simpler but I still felt like creative use of tools like fireworks and smoke bombs gave me plenty of freedom. The awkward traveling system of AC3 has been removed for a clean simplicity of fast travel to synchronization points. You can shop for weapons and clothing which boosts your stats in a way that isn’t overtly burdensome and give you some combat diversity by choosing different types of primary weapons. Most of this is unfortunately tied into a system where you can purchase equipments, upgrades, and “boosts” for real world currency via microtransactions, but Ubisoft was find enough not to make a big show of the real world purchases and I never felt pressured to spend anymore money than I had on, y’know, the game.
I always felt like the poison gas upgrade was needlessly cruel
Where Unity has cleaned up a lot of the superfluous features, it brought some fresh and new frustrating designs to the table. Tips are insanely annoying and something to immediately disable. It will remind you that you have unspent upgrade points every few minutes if you have one and no available upgrades which costs less than five. It also has a habit of spamming annoying messages like a certain annoying fairy and almost always directly over text you are trying to read from a pickup or a mission. Lockpicking is something I could write paragraphs about. The system is one of those press the button when the EXTREMELY FAST AND TINY INDICATOR moves through the highlighted area. To make it worse, it doesn’t even stop when you press the button, but a moment after, interfering with your ability to use fast twitch to solve it. To make matters worse, in some sort of effort to combine all the most frustrating elements of locking together into a living nightmare, failing breaks your lockpicks. The system is basically not worth using until you've bought all the upgrades, the last only being unlockable when the game is nearly over. This makes finding loot chests an emotionally traumatic experience, since half the time they are either locked or only openable if you completed some task on the companion app, and therefore only exist to taunt you.
I hope I don't get a tip to go to a locked chest
If things seem negative so far, I’m actually pretty ambivalent about Unity. For all its obvious missteps, rushed feel, and aggravating design decisions, Unity is still a lot of fun to play. What is most frustrating to me has always been the story. The first Assassin’s Creed had an awesome plot, both present day and in the past, that held a lot of promise for future titles. The titles didn’t really deliver and the story became mired in tropes which are now pretty famously associated with Ubisoft. This game really felt like it was going to be different, if I had written this review having only played half of the game, the tone would have actually been very positive. I was prepared to discuss how the female lead and love interest seemed to be a strong female character with a great deal of personal agency which were not dependant upon the involvement of the protagonist. How Arno was a likeable protagonists with the same Swashbuckling elements as Ezio without the intractable douchiness and stupidity. How Unity’s portrayal of several of France’s historical figures were actually extremely compelling and their involvement in the franchise’s ultimately struggle creatively included. Unfortunately, I finished the game.
So I know what that guy is about to feel like
SPOILERS AHEAD
At this point, I feel as if the gaming community is being taunted by Ubisoft’s writing staff. That they are all too aware of the negative criticism of the past few Assassin’s Creed titles and the hurricane scale disaster that was the Watch Dogs story. Unity's writers drew everything out neatly, making you think it was going to be a story of personal redemption in which women are not just plot devices to be unceremoniously shoved into refrigerators to instigate the protagonist's personal vendetta of revenge. What we got was a typical story of vengeance capstoned by a heavy monologue discussing the importance of personal agency and the free will of man to drive home the work of the assassin’s creed, irrespective of how unrelated the actual events of the story were to those themes. Then at the very last moment, in what was either a masterstroke of literary villainy comparable to that of Shakespeare’s Othello, or perhaps simply the result of a blind panic when the writing staff realized they hadn’t actually thought of an ending and the publisher was demanding an imminent release, we find Elise has been killed, Arno has failed to redeem his past failures, and the credits roll with Arno’s voiceover attempting to somehow relate these two events to the importance of man’s free will.
A strong, independant plot device
END SPOILERS
The modern-day story has also taken a qualitative nosedive ever since AC2. After the very first Assassin’s Creed, little to nothing interesting has been done with this portion of the game, and this is especially true of Unity. I’m not even sure if you are supposed to have a character, or if your Operator is speaking directly to the player. Her pitch is a 5-minute segment in which she rapidly carries a one-sided conversation that jumps from telling you about the existence of the Assassin/Templar conflict to making you agree to join Assassins in exchange for watching video proof of Abstergo’s master plan (in what I can only assume is a tragic allegory of UPlay’s terms of service agreement). The modern-day sequences have also been replaced by server attacks or some nonsense which forces you to jump through a portal into a different period of French history. While the segments aren’t necessarily bad, and provide the opportunity for some really awesome setpieces to navigate, they just come off as bizarre. Given that the Animus system is exploring the genetic memory of an individual, the fact that the server drops you into events that didn’t even happen in the context of the game seems like a conscious effort to poke holes in their own internal logic.
I mean, this is cool, but it also makes no sense
Ubisoft has created a very unique multiplayer experience with the addition of the Club system and co-op missions. Many of the purchasable upgrades have multiplayer effects such as sharing eagle vision, group healing, and group disguise abilities. My first impression was that it was extremely unlikely you could get people coordinated enough to work together like anything resembling a team. I feel like I was half right, since multiplayer is strangely entertaining, but likely not in a way you would expect. Instead of an organized squad of highly trained assassins working together to attack their targets in a coordinated fashion, you get four very individualistic ninjas all flipping all over the place and overwhelming entire squads through the sheer number of solo kills each of them is accumulating. If anything, I found the most interesting aspect to be seeing how differently each person plays the game. I can’t really call it great, especially since the dynamic seems to generate an atmosphere of one-upmanship, but it becomes fun in the same way Legolas and Gimli keeping a running killcount made The Lord of the Rings' massive battles even more entertaining. This is great, unless you happen to be playing a stealth mission, in which case you get to enjoy watching your bonus reward disappear as your squad repeatedly opts for swordfights over subterfuge.
Off-screen, the other two Assassins are fighting 30 alerted guards.
I have really mixed feelings about Unity. Although it has the same rushed, buggy feel as some of the other recent Assassin’s Creed releases, it’s difficult to argue that the game is much more stable than releases like AC3. The majority of the story, it felt like Ubisoft had turned over a new leaf, only to disappoint in the end. It’s frustrating since--at this point--it actually seems like Ubisoft has become completely aware of what they are doing wrong, and are choosing not to make the necessary changes. If this wasn’t eighth title in the franchise, I would feel obligated to give them a break for the game's issues and call it a really great title. As it stands, being one of the biggest franchises in video games and produced by one of the most well-funded developers in the industry, I really don’t feel like they have many excuses left for these problems that seem to appear in every title. Ubisoft has become like a relative with a debilitating drug problem--every few months they pop up out of nowhere, make a token effort to show you they are turning their life around, and only need to borrow $59.99 to get off their feet. You know they are a talented artist and really want them to succeed, but once you fork over the cash they disappear again, leaving you feeling like a fool for trusting them but secretly hoping... maybe in the next release.
REVIEW ROUND-UP
+ Cut a lot of the growing bells and whistles from the AC franchise
+/- Combat has returned to its original danger, but has its own problems
+/- Multiplayer is fun, but not in the way Ubisoft seemed to intend
- The plot is just bad in the same way Ubisoft always seems to catch criticism for
- Modern-day story now actively detracts from the franchise and really should just change or disappear
- Lockpicking is barely worth doing before getting all three upgrades
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